Perched above stacked bleachers on the south side of Mountain America Stadium, a pair of banners showcases the achievements of the Arizona State football program.
The feats of the 2024 Sun Devil squad, the crème de la crème crew of Kenny Dillingham’s young coaching tenure in Tempe, sit atop the list, highlighted by a Big 12 Championship and College Football Playoff appearance.
While the recently installed stadium adornments, added prior to the 2025 season, serve as a reminder of the school’s accomplishments, they also reflect a raised standard, both internally and externally.
In about three and a half years, the success of Dillingham and his staff has fostered new, possibly presumptuous, expectations within the Sun Devils’ fanbase.
It’s a standard that will follow ASU into this fall, even though departures at key positions leave the Sun Devils with a host of question marks.
“People expect us to play good football. Not just (to) be in games; they expect us to win games. That’s a good thing.” Dillingham said. “If you achieve win (total) expectations, you’re going to do that once every three years. If you have real expectations, you’re not going to achieve the expectations of the fanbase of the year. Unfortunately, you’re going to have way more letdowns than you hit expectations because they’re fans.”
These expectations aren’t limited to the predicted win totals distributed by pundits or the deranged dreams of partisan fans. They also trickle down into the standards set for everyone within the building.
Dillingham hasn’t been coy about his aspirations for the program to avoid lingering in the median of college football. In turn, he’s generated support for Arizona State football in a way that allows the program to stay competitive in an everchanging collegiate landscape.
The university’s recent announcement of a partnership with Align Technology to build an indoor practice facility, reportedly costing $55 million according to the Phoenix Business Journal, stands as the latest example.
This heightened commitment played a major role in Dillingham’s decision to stay in Tempe. He inked a five-year extension, despite attempts from football powerhouse Michigan to lure him away from his alma mater.
“We got a taste of the College Football Playoff. It’s something that once you get there you want to do it very often,” athletic director Graham Rossini said. “So, we’re hard at work looking at what are the tools that our coaches can use every day.”
The fanbase has also shown up in larger numbers, with droves of spectators painting Mountain America Stadium maroon and gold en route to eight consecutive sellouts dating back to 2024.
“We expect to have that now. People voted us one of the top three to four home fields in our league,” Dillingham said. “That’s an expectation now. We expect to play at home (and) play good football. We’ve won a lot of home games in the last two years.”
Yet, this support comes with an expectation that the wins will keep coming. The 36-year-old coach hasn’t had a problem with that as of late, notching 19 wins in the past two seasons.
“Expectations (with) everything in the organization,” Dillingham said of the biggest change he’s noticed since his arrival. “What my expectation (is) for Graham (Rossini) and the president and their expectation for me. Everybody has a level of expectation that’s higher throughout the entire organization leading into the city, Valley and fanbase. … The expectations are now here.”
There are more accolades and players to celebrate since Dillingham has arrived, providing evidence of a higher standard. NFL draft picks, bowl game appearances and awards are now more easily accessible.
“We showed up here, and there weren’t things on the walls,” Dillingham said. “Now the expectation is, ‘Did the walls get updated every year? Do they have our people on it?’”
Although decorations in the halls of the Butterfield Kent Furst Student-Athlete Center celebrate the recent achievements of the program’s former cornerstone players, ASU now enters a new era. It’s one that could set the precedent for the years to come.
Heading into a season that’s been clouded by unknowns, the program stares down a prime opportunity to prove it can still meet these rising standards for success, even with a new crop of players.
Senior defensive tackle C.J. Fite enters his fourth year with the program and third as a member of the Pat Tillman Leadership Council. After playing an instrumental role in helping Dillingham launch a new culture and brand for the program, he intends to hold his new teammates to the standard established by prior teams.
“That’s the role I’m in, just trying to pass down the culture,” Fite told reporters at Big 12 Media Days. “This is how we’ve done things, and now we’re going to do it a little better. We’re going to raise the standard.”
The sample size of Dillingham’s coaching tenure may be too small to determine how many wins make for a successful season at Arizona State. Dillingham vehemently states that he doesn’t concern himself with win totals anyway – though the sportsbooks have ASU slotted to finish with around six to seven victories.
However, reaching the eight-win benchmark that the Sun Devils scraped to last year in spite of injuries, and continuing to stack a third-straight winning season could cultivate a new minimum standard that ASU hasn’t been held to in past years.
After all, according to Dillingham, the true measure of a program lies in its floor, not its ceiling.
“You’re going to have valleys and lows when you climb,” Dillingham said following ASU’s 42-39 loss to Duke in the Sun Bowl. “It’s not just a rocket ship to the moon. That’s not a reality, right? Eventually you’re going to reset yourself, because things are going to happen. But the goal is to create a valley that’s higher than it’s ever been.”
The program hasn’t recorded three-straight seasons with at least eight wins since a stretch between 2012-2014. It marks the only time ASU achieved the feat since its all-time winningest coach, Frank Kush, left the program in 1979.
Nonetheless, to Dillingham, the floor isn’t defined by a specific win total. Instead, it’s defined by where the program’s aforementioned expectations lie.
“The floor is when people think you underachieve and (you) win eight games, when you took over a program (where) you won back-to-back three,” Dillingham said. “When people expect more than what they’ve expected in the past, I think that’s what the floor is.”
And though outside noise may indicate an expected slight regression for Sparky in 2026, the program will operate under a raised standard this fall.
“I think last year was a good example of us having raised the floor, and now we just got to continue to keep it there,” Dillingham said.
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